Hundreds of thousands of Washington State residents don’t have health insurance and hundreds of thousands more can't afford the coverage they need. A large part of the problem is big, profitable employers that don’t offer their workers affordable health benefits. We can’t wait any longer for the federal government to act on this crisis.

The Washington Fair Share Health Care Coalition—made up of union members and their families, responsible business people, health care providers, community groups and reform-minded legislators—has come together in Olympia to make sure Washington's biggest employers pay their fair share of their workers' health care costs. We're working on "Fair Share Health Care" legislation that would stop large, profitable corporations like Wal-Mart from shifting costs to workers, taxpayers and other businesses.

When big companies don't pay their fair share of health care costs, everyone else pays. The cost of health care goes up across the board. Taxpayers have to foot the bill to cover the uninsured. In Washington, news reports revealed that thousands of workers and their dependents of very large employers were covered by state-funded health care programs in 2004.

And the responsible businesses that do cover their workers have to compete with these low-road employers.

Bills in the state House and Senate—H.B. 2517 and S.B. 6356—will require large employers to meet minimal standards for providing health coverage to their workers or to pay into a statewide health care fund. Companies with at least 5,000 employees will be required to invest 9 percent of their payroll into health care.

Most of the big companies in the state already meet the standards. But companies that don't are moving their costs to workers and their competitors—and that's just not fair.